Here's What The Next Generation of The Internet Looks Like

The Mozilla Ignite competition, cosponsored with the National Science Foundation, today announced the winners of its yearlong open innovation challenge. These applications are designed to take advantage of a "next generation Internet" currently being piloted in several cities, with speeds up to a gigabyte per second—that's 70% of the speed of light. The directive was that the ideas had to be applied to the public good: no virtual car test drives or immersive real-time ads here. The applications span the realms of health care, disaster response, city planning, citizen science, and education.

Lots of bandwidth means not only a faster Internet, but a smarter Internet with lots of streaming video, 3-D telepresence using tools like Microsoft's Kinect, and real-time analysis of big data.

For example, Real-Time Emergency Response (RtER) is designed to allow first responders to quickly integrate live streaming-video feeds, social media updates, and GPS information coming from the smartphones of multiple people on the ground in a crisis situation, both emergency personnel and members of the general public. Using a Web-based tool and mobile client, the people in the command center could analyze all the live and stored data to determine priorities of what to do next, and even direct individuals in the field as to where to aim their cameras next.

A project with the less-than-catchy title of Easy 3-D provides one of the headiest glimpses of what the ultrafast Internet might bring. The project is spearheaded by the creators of Lynx, an early-model, Kickstarter-funded handheld camera for 3-D motion capture. They plan to integrate with the Lynx to provide cloud processing, editing, content management, and publishing for 3-D content on the Web. The planned tool set will include 3-D printing of your 3-D image, animation, and sharing via social media. "As HD videos and photo rolls incentivized broadband, 3-D content absolutely requires Gigabit to be fully realized," the project creators note.

Are you ready for a YouTube's worth of consumer-created content in three dimensions? Get ready.

Actually, I think you can measure the rate at which a byte of information travels physically over the fiber from point A to point B. "Speed" is not just a metaphor. If you have two cities that are 1000 miles apart, the time it takes to send a message becomes measurable. Cf this Planet Money episode about high-speed trading. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

1) "Speed" as in velocity, ie. the distance between the two points divided by the time for a signal to traverse two points (meters per second), REGARDLESS of data rate in bps. This is ALWAYS 66 - 70% of the speed of light (the percentage is called the velocity factor) for a point-to-point wired or fiber optic connection with no intermediate re-processing (eg. switching & routing) and is physics-bound.

The transit time is technically referred to as "latency" and is the same from point A to point B whether it's a 64 kbps phone call or a 10 Gbps fiber optic link (again, assuming no switching or routing). The latency in seconds = (distance from A to B in meters) / (speed of light in meters per second * velocity factor).

2) "Speed" as in data rate in bps. Yes, you will complete the transmission of a particular block of bits from point A to point B faster using a higher-speed connection, but the velocity will ALWAYS be 66 - 70% of the speed of light and the delay between when any bit leaves A and arrives at B will ALWAYS be determined by the latency described in (1) above.

"with speeds up to a gigabyte per second--that's 70 percent of the speed of light" confuses (2), data rate in bits per second, with (1), velocity in meters per second.